ed to support military research; in particular, research about how to build networks that could withstand partial outages (such as bomb attacks) and still function. At about the same time the Internet was coming into being, Ethernet local area networks ("LANs") were developed. Most of these workstations came with Berkeley UNIX, which included IP (Internet Protocol) networking software. This created a new demand: rather than connecting to a single large timesharing computer per site, organizations wanted to connect the ARPAnet to their entire local network. The demand keeps growing today. Now that most four-year colleges are connected to the Net, people are trying to get secondary and primary schools connected. People who have graduated from college where they have used the resources of the Net in classes, know what the Internet is good for, and talk their employers into connecting different corporations. All this activity points to continued growth, networking problems to solve, evolving technologies, and job security for networkers (Willmott 107). The Internet can also be compared to a church. In many ways the Internet is like a church: it has its council of elders, every member has an opinion about how things should work, and they can either take part or not. It's the choice of the user. The Internet has no president, chief operating officer, or Pope. The constituent networks may have presidents and CEO's, but that's a different issue; there is no single authority figure for the Internet as a whole. As stated by Frances Hentoff, the staff writer for The Village Voice and the author of First Freedoms, "on an info superhighway driven by individuals, there are no cops preventing users from downloading" (Hentoff 1). Internet users can broadcast or express anything they want. The fact that the Net has no single authority figure sets forth a problem about what kind of materials could be available on the Net. The U.S. government is now tryin...
